…Okay, Joe. It’s a block about a foot across. I’d say it’s an olivine basalt. It’s almost rectangular and the top surface is covered in vesicles, large vesicles. It almost looks like a contact here between a thin layer of vesicles and a rock unit that’s a little lighter in colour with fewer vesicles And I think I can see laths of plage in it, randomly oriented, two or three millimetres across… So, in his living room, with a view of an ocean already tinted dark blue by the light of the setting sun, the old man listened to the words he’d once spoken on the Moon, and, as he descended in his mind once more into that lunar rille, he dredged up fragments of description and memory, which Geena noted down.

When she was done, Geena left Jays to his solitary peace. On impulse, she drove on east and north through the darkening, faded grandeur of Seabrook, and it seemed as if maybe all the relics of the Space Age might one day end up here, washed along the coast by some intangible tide of time.

But when she went just a little further north she entered industrial areas. The Dixie Chemical Company, the Graver Tank Mfg Co. Inc., and so on. Further on still, on the Bay Area Boulevard, there were a lot of space-related industrial concerns: Lockheed Martin, Honeywell Space Systems, IBM, Hughes Aircraft, on roads called Moon Rock Drive and Saturn Road. Symbols that space wasn’t yet quite dead, a sepia-tinted memory, an impossible dream of the generation of Heinlein and von Braun.

It was like coming back to the present, she thought, from a dismal descent into the dead past. She opened her window to let fresh air into the car, and turned the radio to a rock channel.

9

Constable Morag Decker swung her patrol car into Viewcraig Gardens and immediately ran into a jam.

She counted three sets of roadworks, a scene of wooden separators and flashing yellow lamps and hard hats and jack-hammers. There were vans belonging to the gas company and British Telecom, and another from a private contractor that looked as if it was responsible for cable repairs, bumped up onto the kerb on both sides of the road. The traffic wasn’t too heavy, in the middle of this Monday morning, with the sun rising high above Arthur’s Seat. But the tailbacks already stretched hundreds of yards to either side.

Maybe she should call the station.

It was unusual for more than one crew to be vandalizing the road surface at any one time. For now, the traffic was moving okay, but she could see the signs of frustration in the way the drivers edged closer together and glared at the crews as they passed. One accident, even something trivial, and the road would be blocked.

Today was April 1st. She wondered if this congestion was the result of some misbegotten joke.